Whether you are just starting to explore the advantages of an online community, implementing a community for the first time, or looking to migrate an existing community to a better solution, running through the top 3 evaluation questions below will guide you in choosing the best way to implement your community solution.
1. Why Community?
A successful online community will provide a positive and productive environment for its members to learn, share, and connect over subjects that they care about. With enterprise communities, it is a chance for customers to interact with you, your other customers and your brand. Your ultimate goal is to help improve their overall experience with your company or organization whether it is through engaging them, supporting them or soliciting feedback from them.
The team at Lithium has been perfecting the community experience since 1997. We've fine-tuned a set of best practices that will help you manage your community properly.
With Lithium's pre-launch on-boarding and training, we'll guide you through these important community elements:
- Defining your community's objectives
- Creating an ideal experience for all your members
- Properly managing your super-users
- Successfully promoting the community itself
- Measuring the metrics that matter
2. Is It Designed for Business?
Enterprise communities are demanding. They require power, scalability, security, and integration. You'll need your solution to effortlessly increase with volume, keep your members and their data secure, and seamlessly integrate with the rest of your site and your CRM solution.
Lithium powers the online communities of huge brands like Dell, Cingular, Comcast, Symantec, and others who all require the most rigid set of specs be met and exceeded by their community providers. These market leaders excel by providing the best overall experience for their customers. And they all believe in the power of community.
With Lithium's advanced technology, you'll have:
- Scalability to increase to any level of member participation
- Security tougher than necessary to meet the heightened concerns sometimes associated with user-generated content
- Integration that is seamless with the rest of your site and your CRM solution
3. Build, Buy … or SaaS It?
Building your own community requires expertise in developing software and the features specifically required to support a community. You'll need to maintain this software and provide new features as your community grows. Unless your company has extreme needs that are integral to your product or service, building your own community software is never a good investment of time and resources.
Installing a purchased software solution will not require technological innovation on your part, but mandates a large investment of IT and development resources. You'll need to integrate the software with your other solutions, maintain data security, provide high bandwidth, and continue to upgrade your software as new programs and features are added to what you bought.
The Software as a Service (SaaS) model allows you to focus on the core competencies of your business, leaving community software development, maintenance, and IT concerns to your provider. When you outsource using an on-demand platform, you can take advantage of the many efficiencies of a hosted environment.
With Lithium's on-demand platform, you'll have:
- No hardware to buy
- No IT hurdles to jump
- No on-going product development requirements to chase after
- Plus deployments and upgrades are fast and easy with a hosted solution.
Why Choose Lithium?
Lithium can help you develop and manage an online community that will be successful. We've balanced the right mix of community expertise, advanced technology, and an on-demand delivery platform that works best for any online community regardless of what unique industry segment you're in.
Learn more about making your community a success in Community Central.
